Cosmic Horror Story / Literature

• Isaac Asimov:
  • "Nightfall (1941)" invokes this premise not with a paranormal deity, but with a natural and real phenomenon. On the planet Lagash, the night sky is only visible every two thousand years, during an eclipse.^note Lagash is in a system with multiple stars, so that only once every 2000 years do they all line up perfectly enough that there are none of them visible — the rest of the time, at least one of them is always in the sky. The concept of "darkness" is so foreign to them that one of the characters needs the concept explained, and torches are an experimental new technology. These eclipses have seemed to coincide with the collapse of past civilizations. A new scientific theory postulates that the night sky, in all its awesome, terrible wonder, has driven every previous civilization mad. On the eve of the next eclipse, the citizens of Lagash are about to find out whether this theory is correct. It is.
  • "Jokester" uses this as The Reveal. An unknown alien power is watching humanity, and is powerful enough to add or remove concepts from the minds of all living beings. The sense of humor was an experiment on the part of this alien power - and as soon as humans taint the experiment by discovering it, humanity's sense of humor is destroyed on the spot.
• Ambrose Bierce's short story An Inhabitant of Carcosa was a major influence on Lovecraft's work
• Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" takes place in an Eldritch Location where the boundaries between our reality and another reality have worn thin. It's very eerie and otherworldly and places a lot of emphasis on incomprehensible reality and human insignificance.
• Robert W. Chambers's book The King in Yellow, which was an influence on Lovecraft himself, and he made references to it that are now better known than the original source. Filled with Mind Screw and Take Our Word for It.
• William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land and The House on the Borderland are also notable forerunners.
• H. P. "Grandpa Cthulhu" Lovecraft and his Weird Tales colleagues - Clark Ashton "Klarkash-ton" Smith, Robert E. "Two-Gun Bob" Howard, etc. - who started the whole Cthulhu Mythos thing (although it wasn't actually named, nor any kind of cohesive whole, until August Derleth laid hands on it) as a collective attempt to lend their works an air of authenticity, by sharing common elements and references as if the stories were actually based on Real Life sources. And it worked - there are now people who genuinely believe the Necronomicon is a real existing book and that Cthulhu was worshiped by ancient Sumerians.
• The works of Arthur Machen were a huge influence on Lovecraft, particularly his 1894 novella The Great God Pan, which gives us the eponymous Eldritch Abomination and was the basis for Lovecraft's own story "The Dunwich Horror". Machen wrote other works of this kind, though The Great God Pan stands out as the most significant.
• Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Horla" is another influence on Lovecraft, with its motifs of a cosmos harbouring unknown terrors and, closer to home, a malevolent, intangible organism capable not only of possessing humans but of one day replacing them as a species. Unless, that is, it's just the narrator gradually going mad.
• Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, of which Lovecraft's own seminal At the Mountains of Madness is a Spiritual Successor if not outright sequel.
• J.H. Rosny's Les Xipéhuz is one of the oldest examples, from 1888, but already dips into Lovecraft Lite. The eponymous Xipéhuz seem all powerful and indestructible at first and threaten to wipe out humanity. Later, they are wiped out themselves by the humans.
• Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger is an early example, taking a nihilistic and maltheistic perspective on Christian theology.
• H. G. Wells:
  • The War of the Worlds (1898), in which a race of Martians arrives on Earth in cylinders containing hundreds of them each. They build gigantic fighting machines capable of leveling cities and killing enormous groups of people very quickly. The military uses just about everything that would have been available at the time, ranging from canons to the ironclad Thunder Child (the ironclad is even replaced by an atomic bomb in the 1953 film), and the best they can do is occasionally stall the Martians before being incinerated. By the second half of the book England is a deserted wasteland with barely anyone left alive. The narrator himself refers to the invasion as "the beginning of the rout of civilization". The only thing that saves humanity is the Martians' bodies being vulnerable to unfamiliar bacteria.
  • The Time Machine has some shades of cosmic horror as well, so far as it emphasizes mankind's insignificance—the protagonist travels thousands of years into the future only to discover that rather than advance, mankind has devolved into two primitive species, the Eloi and the Morlocks (though the 1960 film version was slightly more optimistic, and suggested that it may be possible to rebuild civillization). After that whole adventure he travels further into the future to a point where Earth is implied to be dying and humanity is heavily implied to be gone completely.
• Many stories by Clive Barker, Skins Of The Fathers particularly. They have all the themes: Artifacts of Doom, Eldritch Abominations, Eldritch Locations, and a general sense of dread and fear caused by contact with higher beings that just might not have humanity's best intentions in mind.
• The Croning by Laird Barron is about an Ancient Conspiracy involving a race of rather sadistic Puppeteer Parasites with very insidious intentions for mankind, who are the spawn of an interplanetary (and possibly interdimensional, and even intertemporal) entity only known as Old Leech. They use human bodies to disguise their true forms and characters unlucky enough to uncover their existence usually wish they hadn't. They can also be found in many of Barron's short stories, including The Men From Porlock, Mysterium Tremendum and The Broadsword.
• Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story There Are More Things in Lovecraft's memory. The story tells the encounter the narrator has with a monstrous extraterrestrial inhabiting an equally monstrous house.
• Ramsey Campbell, like fellow brits Brian Lumley and Graham Masterton, is one of the most influential latter-day contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos, especially in his earlier works; there's a reason he's Trope Namer for Campbell Country, after all.
• Cthulhu Armageddon zig-zags between this and Lovecraft Lite. Humankind has survived the Great Old Ones rising and become a New Old West and Weird West combination. However, humankind is gradually dying out and their greatest champion is a humanoid abomination. Then it goes From Bad to Worse.
• Fiona van Dahl's Eden Green has the title character explore an abandoned alien world, including the mountain fortress of an extinct but advanced race, in search of the origin of an alien needle parasite currently threatening her home city. Her nightmares before and after hint that she (like Earth) is a tiny speck in the larger picture.
• Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel House of Leaves. As a book about a book about a film about a blue:House that is a maze (or, in short, a book that is a maze), it layers its Mind Screw into several overlapping narratives, all commenting on each other ^note some warning you of danger , accompanied by some seriously screwed-up typography, all to give the reader the sense of disorientation one would feel inside the ever-shifting, enigmatic house. It's made particularly explicit when the protagonist of the A-story says that the eponymous house actually is God.
• Neil Gaiman:
  • "How to Talk to Girls at Parties." The narrator ends up at the wrong party with his friend, flirts with girls who turn out to be Anthropomorphic Personifications of planets, and is almost consumed by hearing a song from one of them. His friend tries to make out with a sun and inadvertently pisses her off, and the narrator never hears from him again.
  • "A Study in Emerald" is a Sherlock Holmes homage set in a late 19th century where the Great Old Ones took over centuries ago. While the world superficially is much like ours and the God-Monsters themselves seem as if they've gone native, one doesn't need to scratch the surface much to find exceedingly unpleasant facts and goings-on which may soon lead to the apocalypse. Imagine the first half of the 20th century if all world leaders were even worse monsters.
  • "I, Cthulhu" is a parody of this, being the life story of Cthulhu, told by the Big C himself for the purpose of a memoir. We find out that from the Abominations' end, they're essentially a bunch of irresponsible partygoers.
• John Hodgman's That is All has a day by day summary of Ragnarok in 2012. 700 Ancient and Unspeakable Ones destroy the world over the course of the year, killing humanity and any chance of civilization rebuilding in horrific and sometimes darkly humorous ways.
• It's Just A Scratch starts as an urban fantasy with elements of psychological horror. Then it turns out even in a world where humans, wizards, vampires, and werewolves co-exist, there still are things far beyond the main characters' understanding. When the angel shows up to Carmine, everything goes south fast. Worse yet? The Artifact of Doom that caused everything to go wrong was just the angel's broken talon, which is still malevolent enough that it drove the antagonist to literal insanity, and there's the implication that there are more such Things out there.
• Stephen King likes tropes associated with this genre, particularly Eldritch Abominations, although most often they're limited in how much they can affect the world. He also uses Lovecraft Country a lot (many of his works are set in New England, most often rural Maine).
  • In IT, the eponymous monster is perceived as a Giant Spider by the protagonists, because this was the closest analogue that their rational minds could find for Its appearance. Attempting to fight It can result one's mind being flung beyond the edge of the universe, then being driven mad by the Deadlights (which It is merely an appendage of). After the protagonists succeed in killing It, they magically forget about the entire incident; apparently this was the only way they could have lived a normal life afterward.
  • "The Mist" describes what happens when ordinary folk are confronted with an encroaching alternate reality that gradually enshrouds everything in an unnatural fog filled with predatory Eldritch Abominations. (Although as the novella explicitly states, they aren't truly "Lovecraftian" horrors, in that they can bleed and die, particularly if they are set on fire. They're really just animals, albeit incredibly aggressive, dangerous, and horrible-looking ones.)
  • In The Dark Tower several hints are dropped regarding entities and realities of this magnitude, especially in regards to "Todash Darkness and the unspeakable things that dwell there in the black never between realities". The scenes in Book Seven regarding Roland, Susannah, and Oy fleeing through Castle Discordia from one of these things that somehow got OUT of Todash are laced with suggestive themes about what would happen when the Tower falls and Todash sets these critters loose on all the many universes.
  • Revival is revealed to be this in its closing chapters, when we're shown a glimpse of the afterlife: it consists of everyone who dies being herded naked across a barren landscape by cruel, ant-like monsters to "serve the Great Ones in Null", where there will be "No death, no light, no rest." Ruling over this hellscape is "Mother", an enormous creature made of human faces that will, if anyone voices the slightest bit of resistance, tear the sky open and drive everyone it can touch to murder, suicide, insanity, or all three.
  • Under the Dome: The titular dome is the creation of alien children at play. It's only lifted when the protagonists momentarily induce a sense of pity in one of the children.
• Most of T.E.D. Klein's work falls into this. It also takes a rather meta perspective on it, often taking place from the point of view of people very familiar with the genre who still find themselves blindsided by what they encounter.
  • "The Events at Poroth Farm" and his later novel-length expansion of it, The Ceremonies, is about a small religious community besieged by a parasitic Eldritch Abomination.
  • Each story in Dark Gods falls into this. "Black Man with a Horn" is notable for being set in the Cthulhu Mythos itself, and for taking place from the perspective of one of Lovecraft's colleagues who discovers that his friend's creations were Real After All.
• C. S. Lewis's:
  • Perelandra, after Weston returns to his body which had heretofore been possessed by a bent eldil, the picture he paints of the afterlife suggests a Cosmic Horror universe: Reality as we know it is just a thin shell surrounding an endless abyss of nothingness, and ultimately nothing humanity does matters. However, this being a novel by C.S. Lewis, he's wrong about the universe; and it's suggested that this wasn't even Weston talking, but an eldil impersonating Weston in hopes of discouraging Ransom.
  • Mere Christianity: In this apologetic work, Lewis addresses the criticism that Christianity is (or should be) believed simply because it is comforting; in response he writes that without the possibility of redemption offered by Christ's Passion, the prospect of an all-good God and a universe full of sinful humanity is anything but comforting:
    "This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from."
• Thomas Ligotti is a practitioner of cosmic horror, in works such as "Nethescurial":
  "See, there is no shape in the fireplace. The smoke is gone, gone up the chimney and out into the sky. And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things. Nethescurial is not the secret name of the creation. It is not in the rooms of houses and beyond their walls... beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies... below earth mound and above mountain peak... in northern leaf and southern flower... inside each star and the voids between them... within blood and bone, through all souls and spirits... among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds... behind the faces of the living and the dead."
  • The Red Tower is about the conflict between an eldritch factory for disturbing novelties, and the surrounding wastelands eroding back it into the natural order of nothingness, as described by a narrator who seems to have gone mad from a revelation which they are now trying to explain through metaphor. The irony and the terror of the story are that the “Red Tower” in question can easily be seen as a description of life in the Universe.
• Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, starting from The Three-Body Problem, is a big example of sci-fi Cosmic Horror. Humanity made First Contact with an alien civilization, the Trisolarians, who intend to colonize Earth to flee from their uninhabitable home world. They are magnitudes beyond Earth in technology and had locked down Earth's scientific development before their invasion even begins, and when they finally arrive, a single probe obliterates the entirety of Earth Fleet in minutes, before the audience is revealed to that the entire universe operates underneath The Dark Forest Principle: with civilizations being naturally wary of other civilizations that it is far too easy to have the various civilizations completely annihilate all of the other civilizations is seen as the universal norm, plunging the entire story into hopelessness as everyone in the universe is hostile to each other by nature, and way beyond anything the Humans and the Trisolarians could hope to survive against. By the third book, a third civilization having noticed both worlds casually destroys Trisolaran and later obliterates the entirety of Solar System by flattening it into 2D, and all that the few stranded survivors can do is to hide and preserve whatever traces of humanity were left, since the universe is completely hopeless. Even worse is that it is said that The Dark Forest Principle has been in-effect since as far back as when life first manifested in the universe: back when the universe was 10 Dimensional: it had been through various destructive conflicts between the advanced civilizations that caused the upper seven Dimensions to be annihilated all the way down to the 3D universe that our story takes place in; with Humankind discovering trace remnants of the Fourth Dimension that are slowly dissolving, and that these very same dimension-destroying weapons are still causing so much destruction across the universe that the Third Dimension is close to being completely destroyed...
• Sarah Monette's The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth stories take place in a Cosmic Horror Story universe — unsurprisingly, as she openly acknowledges Lovecraft as a major influence.
• Michael Moorcock:
  • The Elric Saga's world has many, many ancient evils that used to rule the world and now lie around decaying and waiting to destroy any traveler they meet. Elric himself rules over the remnants of one of these evil empires, and his patron god is an Eldritch Abomination (as are virtually all the other gods; Warhammer's Order Versus Chaos theme was clearly inspired by Moorcock's work, at least until they decided to get rid of the Order part). The final book involves the world being completely remade by the Eldritch Abominations, and the "good" ending to the story accepts this as inevitable.
  • In the Corum series the title character fights against Elric's Lords of Chaos in the first series, and in the second series against a group of Eldritch Abominations who are based on the elemental forces of cold and death.
  • An interesting variation is The Dancers at the End of Time: Humanity itself is the source of the horror. Having reached omnipotence through enormously energetically costly technology, they dramatically sped up the heat death of the universe, and the few surviving races still coexisting with humanity are witnessing the stars dying at a frightening rate. Also, since this is a Moorcock story, there is also the implication that some of the Abominations who are wreaking havoc in Elric's universe — including Elric's own Patron God - are in fact Dancers who decided to take part in wars between gods to stave off their boredom.
• Sean O'Hara's My Dark and Fearsome Queen: Plato was right — except we're the shadows on the wall. And sometimes people from outside enter the cave and alter our existence by their mere presence. Even the nominal good guys don't much care how this affects us. And too much alteration of our "reality" causes distortions, which manifest through Eldritch Abominations.
• W.H. Pugmire writes this genre from an unusual angle. Some of his stories are from inhuman perspectives, while many of his human protagonists actively seek fates like dissolution in the cosmic ether.
• Cthulhu's Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, is an anthology of short stories on what life — well, existence anyway — on Earth would be like when the Old Ones return.
• Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! is, from the Whos' point of view, a story about their entire world being at the mercy of incomprehensibly huge beings, only one of whom can hear them and believes in protecting them from all the others, who don't even believe they exist and want to destroy their world just to Kick the Dog.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin is about an eldritch god that torments people by trapping them in a sadistic cycle of reincarnation until they are completely broken inside.
• Charles Stross:
  • The Laundry Files take place in a world where bureaucratic top secret government agencies even more covert and shadowy than MI5 and the CIA battle Eldritch Abominations attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers and the Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust to win the Second World War. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, where the Elder Gods devour the world, is definitely going to happen; the only question is how long we've got, and the best estimates have it as a matter of a few years... if we're lucky. In The Labyrinth Index, an avatar of Nyarlathotep is the new PM, and Cthulhu is attempting to become the President of the USA.
  • "Missile Gap" begins with humanity finding itself on a colossal, extragalactic construct after being somehow moved there by an unknowable civilization, engendering a good deal of dread about why this happened and what these entities are trying to achieve with it. The ending answers some of these questions, mostly by way of describing humanity as an evolutionary dead-end of piddling importance, doomed to being unsentimentally eliminated by more successful and efficient civilizations.
  • "A Colder War", as its title may reveal, mixes late Cold War paranoia with the Cthulhu Mythos as different factions try to exploit its implications for military purposes, while being more preoccupied by mundane ideological concerns than what those implications mean, with... unpleasant results.
• The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign: The main premise is that the White Queen, the Top God of the setting who is seen as an incarnation of benevolence, is actually an Eldritch Abomination who doesn't care for humanity as a whole. She does love one person, the main character Kyousuke... in an extremely inhuman fashion, as she sees no problem with making his life a living hell. Kyousuke does manage to defeat her and thwart her plans repeatedly, but only because she doesn't mind losing and so never uses her full power.
• Watership Down has quite a few rather subtle elements of cosmic horror when you get away from the main plot and look at the setting. The world the protagonists live in is filled with all sorts of dangerous creatures that are both sentient and in many cases actively malevolent and have at the very top of said list of enemy races an entire race of eldritch abominations. This race of cosmic horrors are a driving force in the plot, which starts with the protagonists' exodus when said eldritch beings destroy their original home for incomprehensible reasons, displaying a huge Lack of Empathy. In the course of their exodus, they encounter two other colonies of their kind, one of which is a fascist Dystopia that hides itself for protection against those cosmic horrors, and the other is a Town with a Dark Secret who has a sinister Faustian covenant with one of the eldritch abominations that has them being occasionally picked to be eaten, leaving the rest living on the brink of madness and death. What makes this a Cosmic Horror is that there is absolutely nothing the characters can do to overthrow or even really harm the Eldritch Abominations or change the status quo. The main cast of characters are feral rabbits and the Eldritch Abominations are humans.
  • In fact, the rabbits have a very good understanding of what humans are (merely the most lethal of predators) and some of the dangers they pose. The explicit eldritch horror within their own mythos is the Black Rabbit of Inle, the rabbits' Grim Reaper. In their myths he occasionally exerts a protective function (no rabbit may die without his say-so), but interacting with him is a death sentence; when he calls a rabbit, that rabbit's time has come.
• Peter Watts's Blindsight is essentially Cosmic Horror Story made realistic and scientifically hard. The novel deals with characters that display psychopathic or sociopathic traits, and is set in a future in which the basic human sense of worth is undermined by the social implications of new technologies. However the true cosmic horror is revealed near the end; the aliens are actually all impossible-to-understand beings that are non-sapient. Sentience itself is an evolutionary aberration and perceived by the aliens as a blight on the galaxy. In fact, the only way an extremely intelligent non-conscious entity can understand attempts to communicate is as an attack, since from its perspective it's being made to waste energy processing nonsense information. The novel ends with the implication that humans may be evolving away from sentience again, since it's not actually necessary at all. The sequel, Echopraxia, goes even further, examining the theory of a holographic universe; namely that the universe could just be one big simulation, with the laws of physics being the programming and God being the virus that breaks them.
• Humans, or rather their evolutionary descendants, are the cosmic horrors in Walter Jon Williams' short story Dinosaurs. Millions of years in the future humanity has been genetically engineered into multiple forms that effectively behave like hive insects; they're intelligent but no longer capable of thinking or acting outside of their programmed roles. They no longer even understand the idea of individuals having any worth, meaning that they nonchalantly slaughter billions of members of lesser species who just happen to be in the way.
• In Jack Williamson's short story "Born of the Sun", the planets of the Solar system are actually eggs of space-dwelling dragon-like monsters that start hatching. Pluto first.
• Several of Colin Wilson's works dabble in this; The Mind Parasites in particular plunges in head first, and The Space Vampires was the inspiration for Lifeforce (1985), described in the film section.
• The Adversary Cycle by F. Paul Wilson depicts a struggle between two forces over Earth — the Otherness and the Ally. Neither of them care about humanity — it's just a counter in a galaxy-spanning conflict for an unknown goal, and implied to be a relatively worthless one at that. The Ally protects Earth simply because the Otherness wants it, and the protagonists serve the Ally only because the consequences of the Otherness taking over Earth are far, far worse.
• David Wong's John Dies at the End and its sequel This Book is Full of Spiders are Cosmic Horror masquerading as Lovecraft Lite. The antagonists are Eldritch Abominations from parallel realities or stranger places intent on entering our reality and shaping it to suit them. It's strongly implied by the end of the second book that the only reason they haven't been successful so far is that there are so many of these things trying to invade our reality that their various plans and agents keep interfering with each other.
• Chris Wooding's The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray has the standard deluded-fools-summoning-eldritch-abominations plot.
• Worm has quite a few elements of cosmic horror, particularly in the Endbringers, horrifically powerful monsters that regularly obliterate major population centers. The efforts of all the heroes and villains combined is really only enough to stall them and limit the damage until Scion, the first and most powerful parahuman, shows up to actually push them back. Even then he is apparently unable to decisively defeat them once and for all (it turns out this is actually because he was never told to actually kill the Endbringers, just to fight them off. When instructed to actually kill them, he does so without trouble. Near the end of the series it's revealed that Scion is actually the avatar of an Entity, one of a race of Eldritch Abominations that devour entire planets to reproduce. All superpowers in the setting are due to shards of these Entities attaching to people, as part of their reproductive cycle. The final arc is about what happens when Scion learns that Evil Feels Good. The setting ultimately tilts towards Lovecraft Lite. Through their combined efforts, the parahumans of multiple dimensions are able to destroy the true body of Scion. The Sequel Series Ward deals with humanity slowly recovering after the results of the original story, although they (unsurprisingly) have a whole host of new horrific things to deal with.
• WorldEnd: What Do You Do at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? has some notable Cosmic Horror Story elements beneath its fantasy exterior. Nearly all life on the surface was wiped out by the 17 Beasts 500 years prior to the main story. These creatures, as it turns out, inhabited the planet long before the other races and simply re-emerged to take back what was once theirs. In fact, all of WorldEnd's races were created when the Visitors, a race of godlike extraterrestrials, used their powers to transform those primordial Beasts into the various races that would inhabit their new garden world. The apocalypse that destroyed the surface was a result of the human race reverting back to its original Beast form after its population grew too much for the Visitors' power to contain.
• Xeelee Sequence is a rare hard sci-fi take on the trope that also subverts the themes of cosmic horror. In the Xeeleeverse, the cosmic races are actually more benign or at the very least, disinterested between the squabbles of the lesser races. Whatever damages the ancient races would do on humanity or the multiverse is more of a collateral damage between their wars directed at each other rather than us. If anything, the true horror lies in humanity itself, which has degenerated into one of the most monstrous and inhuman sci-fi polities ever written into fiction. With the most eldritch horror of them all being a descendant of humanity itself called the Transcendence that was driven insane by all the knowledge it had collected from every potential timeline, rather than the ancient cosmic races. In the Xeeleeverse, the greatest fear isn't the fear of the unknown, but the fear of the known and the resulting futility behind such knowledge.

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